Creating business intelligence from course management systems

This article seeks to address the interface between individual learning facilitators that use course management systems (CMS) data to support decision‐making and course design and institutional infrastructure providers that are responsible for institutional business intelligence.

The design of a data warehouse is proposed that draw data from institutional transactional systems to provide decision support to individual action researchers. A prototype data warehouse is built to evaluate by means of a case study the usefulness validity of analyses performed.

Many facilitators of learning draw manually the same type of queries from CMS data for purposes of action research. On the other hand, more and more HEI infrastructure providers create data warehouses to support many kinds of decision‐making. It is possible and valuable to follow a business intelligence approach to facilitate the queries drawn by individual action researchers from course management systems (CMSs).

The expectation exists that as the technology on which CMSs, as well as business intelligence tools are built evolves, the creation of full‐scale business intelligence will become more feasible and scalable.

This article addresses the gap between individual action researchers that use CMS data to support decision making and course design, on the one hand, and institutional infrastructure providers that are responsible for institutional business intelligence on the other hand. Research questions are asked and addressed and processes are designed to manage business measurements consistently.